Orson Scott Card
- Ender's Game, Introduction - The True Story
The "true" story is not the one that exists in my mind... The story in my mind is nothing but a hope; the text of the story is the tool I created in order to try to make that hope a reality. The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.

Neil Gaiman
- American Gods - Religions are Metaphors
Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you - even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers and triumphs... Religions are places to stand and look and act, vantage points from which to view the world.

Kim Stanley Robinson
- "No intrinsic worth" - Blue Mars
"It's like a rainbow. Without an observer at a twenty-three-degree angle to the light reflecting off a cloud of spherical droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our spirits stand at a twenty-three-degree angle to the universe. There is some new thing created at the contact of photon and retina, some space created between rock and mind. Without mind there is no intrinsic worth." "That's just like saying there is no intrinsic worth...

Stephen Splatz
- Pornography
The best way to distinguish a work of pornography from a conventional narrative is to look at its structure. All narratives, to some extent, are concerned with such things as character, plot, exposition, development, climax and resolution; but in pornography these are merely nods to propriety, threadbare garments which barely conceal the real purpose of the narrative: to deliver a particular kind of gratification again and again.

Kim Stanley Robinson
- Green Mars, The deep chasm of all their years
Her mouth tightened unhappily, and she looked past him, into the deep chasm of all their years. Sliding back down the sine curve of her moods, into something darker and deeper. Michel watched it happen with a sweet resignation. He had been happy for a very long time; and just in that expression on her face, he could see that he would, if he stayed with this, be trading his happiness - at least that particular happiness - for her.

Kim Stanley Robinson
- Red Mars, "What words ask for"
"What can I say, friends?" he cried. "This is the thing itself, there are no words for this. This is what words ask for." But his blood ran high with adrenaline, with tequila and omegandorph and happiness, and without willing it the words spilled out of him as they so often had before. "Look" he said, " here we are on Mars!"

Kim Stanley Robinson
- Red Mars, "we can never see anything but our own faces"
"I know." She sighed. "We'll all say that. We'll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it's all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we'll be here, and we'll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces."

Kim Stanley Robinson
- Red Mars, "History is Lamarckian!"
No, no, no, no! History is not evolution! It is a false analogy! Evolution is a matter of environment and chance, acting over millions of years. But history is a matter of environment and choice, acting within lifetimes, and sometimes within years, or months, or days! History is Lamarckian! So that if we choose to establish certain institutions on Mars, there they will be! And if we choose others, there they will be!